Byline: Pat Johnson and Cynthia Ramsay

Left to right: Councilor Kelly Greene, Councilor Bill McNulty, Bayit past president Michael Sachs, Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie, Bayit president Keith Liedtke, Councilor Chak Au and Councilor Alexa Loo at the Bayit, after the mayor officially proclaims Jan. 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day in the city of Richmond. (photo by Cynthia Ramsay)

On Jan. 22, emotions were near the surface in a Holocaust commemoration that included the official proclamation of Jan. 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day in the city of Richmond. In a packed sanctuary at the Bayit, a synagogue in the province’s second-largest Jewish community, survivors, rabbis, community leaders and a host of elected officials from all levels of government were on hand to mark what was billed as an historic day.

Writer and teacher Lillian Boraks-Nemetz spoke as a survivor of the Holocaust and shared her first-person account, as well as the moral implications of what happened and the weight of survival.

Lillian Boraks-Nemetz (photo by Cynthia Ramsay)

“Not a day passes when I don’t ask myself why did I survive when six million perished, 1.5 million children and among them my 5-year-old sister,” said Boraks-Nemetz. “And I survived. Why? When every European Jewish child was automatically sentenced to death by Hitler, I won. Was my survival a miracle? A twist of fate? The will of God? Why me?”

She recalled the day everything changed, Sept. 1, 1939.

“I was alone on the porch of my grandfather’s summer home when masses of airplanes passed over my head. I heard shots, explosions, my dad ran to get me and we barely made it to the shelter, where the sight of crying children and frightened people confirmed my own fears,” she said. The Nazis invaded her Polish homeland. Jews lost all human rights, her father lost his right to practise law, her uncle was prevented from practising medicine. Teachers, professors and businesspeople were all kicked out of their positions. Jewish children did not attend schools and they were bullied, a precursor of the much graver fate to come.

Soon the Jews of Warsaw were imprisoned in the ghetto, where a Nazi-created dystopia developed.

“People stole food from each other,” she said. “All morality ceased to exist in an amoral world.”

Young Lillian was smuggled into the factory where her mother was a slave labourer. Lillian’s grandmother had bought a small house in a village and promised it to a man in exchange for posing as her husband, creating a pretext of a non-Jewish Polish family. Lillian was then smuggled from the ghetto through bribery and survived the war with her grandmother and the man.

“What were my chances of surviving? The rate of a child’s surviving the ghetto was seven percent,” she said. “We were liberated in 1945 by the Russians. But liberation isn’t liberating to survivors.”

While adults worked to reestablish their lives in a new country, children were left largely to their own devices to assimilate all that had happened. Psychiatry or any professional help was largely nonexistent.

“I was told to forget and to let go by people who didn’t have a clue what was on my mind or my soul,” she told the audience. “This was not a physical wound that results in a bruise or a scab, which then falls off and mostly disappears. This is a branding on the soul of fire caused by man’s inhumanity to man, woman and child. The enormity of the Holocaust is still largely incomprehensible and still emotionally inaccessible to those who were born here.”

Judy Darcy (photo by Cynthia Ramsay)

Judy Darcy, British Columbia’s minister of mental health and addictions, shared the story of how her father survived the Holocaust and subsequently hid his Jewish identity to everyone, including his own children, until the last years of his life, when he tried to reconcile his experiences in meetings with the late Toronto rabbi Gunter Plaut. Darcy’s story was featured in the Independent (Feb. 24, 2017, jewishindependent.ca/mlas-father-hid-past).

Rabbi Levi Varnai, spiritual leader of the Bayit, recalled his family’s survival during the Holocaust, and Ezra Shanken, chief executive officer of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, spoke of the human potential for good and evil.

“We must understand that we as human beings have the capacity for immense love but also to create immense pain and it’s only through disciplining ourselves through education and through moments like this that we ensure that the community that I think we all want, which is a community of love, is what will remain,” Shanken said.

Ezra Shanken (photo by Cynthia Ramsay)

Richmond’s Mayor Malcolm Brodie spoke at the event. In an interview with the Independent after, he noted that he often receives requests for proclamations. Recently, the urgency for making a statement and standing with Jewish people was accentuated when a Richmond auction house had to be pressured to cancel the sale of Nazi military memorabilia. Participating in the commemoration with the Jewish community was significant for him, said the mayor, and the past is a lesson for the future.

“I found it quite moving,” said Brodie, noting the remarks by Boraks-Nemetz and Darcy. It is important, he said, “to remind people, and the greater community, to watch out for the signs, because something like this – hopefully never on the scale – but something could happen again.… There have been enough times recently that antisemitism is still a real thing. It is something that we don’t hear too much about but it is something that is very real. In addition to honouring these millions who died, we have to educate young people to make sure that everybody knows the facts and we make sure that it never happens again.”

Michael Sachs, a Jewish community activist and past president of the Bayit, was pivotal in organizing the event – which was co-hosted by the Bayit, Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, Kehila Society of Richmond and Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver – and ensuring the attendance of the elected officials. Among the attendees were the mayor, most of Richmond’s city councilors, all four of the city’s members in the Legislature, Member of Parliament Alice Wong and former MP Joe Peschisolido, as well as others.

“There were 100 chairs and it was standing room only,” Sachs said afterward. “It’s historic because it’s the first time in Richmond that this proclamation has been made. To have such an outpouring of elected officials, VIPs and all these people coming out – it’s the first in history in Richmond.”

Sachs was effusive in his praise for the mayor for his actions. While many commemorations are taking place because it is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, that was not a prime motivator of the Richmond event, said Sachs.

“It’s the first step of many that will come,” he said. “It’s the beginning of a real public acknowledgement that will lead to more public education. We had someone who was there, one of the aides of an elected official, and he came up to me afterwards and he said, ‘I didn’t know anything about the Holocaust.’ That’s one person right there,” Sachs said. “And, hopefully, this moment continues to help bring Holocaust education into every classroom in this province.”

In The Singing Abortionist, Dr. Henry Morgentaler comes across as an enigmatic figure. (photo from Vancouver Jewish Film Festival)

This year’s Vancouver Jewish Film Festival will entertain, inform and challenge viewers, from its opening event – YidLife Crisis, a film all in Yiddish (with English subtitles), and its Yiddish-speaking stars/writers Jamie Elman and Eli Batalion as guests – to its final screening, the French film Once in a Lifetime, based on the true story of an inner-city high school in Paris. This week, the Jewish Independent gives you a glimpse into the festival, which runs Nov. 5-12 at Fifth Avenue Cinemas.

A difficult national hero

There are few surnames in Canada that can evoke such visceral and opposite reactions as Morgentaler. Henry Morgentaler is the name most associated with abortion – with providing abortion services to women, with fighting abortion laws, and for eventually leading a case to the Supreme Court of Canada that resulted in the permanent overturning of Canada’s abortion statute.

To allies, he is a hero. To enemies, he is “Hitler,” as countless people scream at him in footage in the documentary The Singing Abortionist. (He was known to hum or sing a few lines while performing abortions, including one he performed on CTV’s W5 program, which ran the procedure in its five-minute entirety.) Yet even to allies – including his children – he is, as one biographer described him, a “difficult hero.”

In interviews before his death in 2013, Morgentaler acknowledged that everything he did in life was with the aim of earning the love of women. This guided him in becoming the foremost advocate in the country for women’s reproductive choice, but it also led to his reputation as a “womanizer.”

Morgentaler was a relatively unknown doctor when he felt morally bound to begin offering abortions, a crime that carried a potential life sentence for the doctor and two years in prison for the patient. Across 20 years of legal battles, including a stint in prison, Morgentaler led the legal and PR battle for choice, which culminated in his case before the Supreme Court of Canada that, in 1985, struck down Canada’s abortion law.

In this one-hour film, Morgentaler comes across as an enigmatic figure. He admits to megalomania, albeit with a guffaw. His children speak about their own conflicted relationships with him. His lawyer says Morgentaler was an easy target for anti-abortion forces to caricature as a “strange-looking, hook-nosed Jew.” Morgentaler is both introspective about his motivations but clearly suppresses, according to those around him, his experiences as a Holocaust survivor.

But Morgentaler’s career – particularly his lifelong devotion to the fight for abortion rights – is a direct result of his suffering under Nazism. He was a forced laborer in the Lodz Ghetto before it was liquidated and its residents sent to Auschwitz. The film follows Morgentaler on his only return to the place where he lost his mother, and where he and his brother survived. The experience, he tells the filmmaker, taught him that, “Just the fact that something is law does not necessarily mean it is good or justified or it’s rational.”

– PJ

Monumental reconstruction

Before the Holocaust, Poland had about 200 wooden synagogues, a richness of liturgical architecture that one expert said “rivals the greatest wooden architecture anytime in history, anywhere in the world.” All were lost.

That American expert, Rick Brown, began a project to painstakingly reconstruct from photographic and other records a prime example of that lost history. Working, first, with his students at the Massachusetts College of Art, the project eventually expanded to include more than 300 people, mostly students, from 46 universities and 11 countries.

Raising the Roof tells the story of how a team of hundreds recreated the painted roof and ceiling of Gwozdziec Synagogue in Poland. (photo from VJFF)

The undertaking was monumental. Using only the tools that were available at the time, and working on site over successive summers in Poland and Ukraine, the team recreated the intricately constructed and painted roof and ceiling of Gwozdziec Synagogue. (Gwozdziec is actually in Ukraine, but was part of the greater Polish territory during the heyday of synagogue architecture and its synagogue is both one of the most dramatic and one with the most information available to aid the team in recreating it.)

Brown and his group didn’t know what they would do with the to-scale project when it was completed, but fate intervened. The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews had been designed to accommodate exactly such a replica. After years of tree-felling, lathing, metalworking, complex joinery and scrupulous research on building techniques and paint colors, the roof and ceiling were raised into place at the Warsaw museum.

Raising the Roof, the film that tells the story of the project, is fascinating on multiple fronts. It involves many people with divergent motivations, including Jews, non-Jews, Americans, Poles, artists and even volunteers with no particular skill beyond enthusiasm. There are poignant reflections on the meaning of the original architecture, its loss and regeneration. Underpinning the entire project is the memory of the lost civilization of Polish Jewry, from which 70% of today’s Jews have ancestry, and whose architecture and culture can be reclaimed, but whose existence cannot.

– PJ

Being high and low in Haifa

If you can hand yourself over to filmmaker Elad Keidan and immerse yourself in the sights of Yaron Scharf and especially the sounds created by Aviv Aldema, Afterthought is a worthwhile journey.

The Israeli film’s Hebrew title, Hayored Lema’ala, “down up,” basically sums up what happens on the outward level. Moshe, whose name and story we don’t find out till almost the very end, goes off in search of his wife’s lost earring, which leads to other discoveries about his wife and their relationship. As he starts his exploration up the stairs to the top of Mount Carmel in Haifa, Uri begins his descent to the port, where, we eventually find out, he is planning on catching a freighter abroad, both to finish writing a book and to avoid army reserve duty, as well as to run away from mistakes he has made. The two men pass the same sights, sounds and people at different points in the day, and they encounter each other, stopping for a brief chat – Moshe was Uri’s third-grade teacher, it turns out.

The English title for the film comes from a conversation Moshe overhears in a coffee shop. A man tells his friend about how he wishes that, after a talk with his mother, for example, he could call his mom and leave a message with everything that he actually wanted to say, or meant to say.

Afterthought is Keidan’s first feature, and it is a solid debut despite the slow pace. Viewers are ultimately rewarded by the internal ups and downs of the main characters, the men’s reflections on life, friends and family, and the people they meet along the way. Aldema’s radio snippets, machine and human noises, music selections and other sound effects are a character in and of themselves, and are worth the price of admission alone. These, together with Scharf’s cinematography – which is not flashy, but subtly effective – and the acting of Itay Tiran as Uri and Uri Klauzner as Moshe make for a movie that will not only have you thinking of it afterwards, but of your own life, the choices you have made, and the people you hold dear.

– CR

For the film schedule, tickets and information on all the festival’s offerings, visit vjff.org.

Liberal Party of Canada leader Justin Trudeau in an interview with Cynthia Ramsay of the Jewish Independent. (photo by Adam Scotti)

Justin Trudeau said he is cautiously optimistic about the Iran nuclear deal, insisted he is committed to fighting ISIS and reiterated his commitment to the environment and social fairness in an exclusive interview with the Jewish Independent.

The federal Liberal leader, who hopes to be prime minister after the Oct. 19 federal election, acknowledged the implications of Iran’s agreement with Western powers over its nuclear program, which the Tehran regime maintains is for energy purposes only.

“We all start from the same place on this – a nuclear-armed Iran is a threat not just to Israel, not just to the region, but to the entire world, and we have to make sure that Iran doesn’t achieve that,” Trudeau said.

There are only two ways to reach this objective, he said: direct military intervention on the ground against the Iranian regime or a diplomatic agreement. “We don’t have such a great record of military intervention in that part of the world,” he noted, stressing that the agreement is “not based on trust but on verification.”

“We are cautiously optimistic about the deal,” he said. “We’re not saying we should drop the sanctions today. Obviously, there are a lot of milestones to be addressed, but I think anything [is positive] that sets us down the path of both delaying the ability significantly of Iran to get the nuclear bomb and increases the ability of the Iranian people to put pressure on their regime to change – because we all know we can make a tremendous distinction between the Iranian citizens and their government that doesn’t represent them particularly well.”

Trudeau also advocated reopening diplomatic relations with Iran eventually. “I do feel that it would be very nice to hope to reopen that embassy at one point because you don’t have embassies with just your friends, you have your embassies with the people you disagree with,” he said. “However, on top of addressing the nuclear concerns, Iran has to do an awful lot to demonstrate that it’s no longer going to be a state sponsor of terrorism in the region, around the world, and they have to do an awful lot around human rights and repression of their own citizens and dissent within Iran before they can rejoin the community of nations. But I think we’re on a path that should be cause for at least a level of comfort that perhaps we’re in a positive direction now.”

In speaking with the JI after a speech to the Richmond Chamber of Commerce last Friday, Trudeau, in his second exclusive with the paper, clarified his stance around confronting ISIS.

“This is a great opportunity for me to spell out our position on this,” he said. “The Liberal party feels it is extremely important that Canada be a significant part in the effort against ISIS. We are absolutely supportive of being part of that coalition and, indeed, we feel there is a military role for Canada in the fight against ISIS that can make a very big difference. We disagree that bombing is the best way for Canada to do that. That’s why we voted against the mission and voted against the expansion of the mission into Syria, because it has a likely side effect of strengthening Bashar al-Assad’s grip on power and that we don’t necessarily want.”

“We are absolutely supportive of being part of that coalition and, indeed, we feel there is a military role for Canada in the fight against ISIS that can make a very big difference. We disagree that bombing is the best way for Canada to do that.”

What Trudeau would prefer, he said, is for Canada to provide more humanitarian aid, for example, and for this country’s military to provide the kind of role it does in Afghanistan. “We’ve developed tremendous expertise,” he said, “which is training the local troops to be able to take the fight more efficiently to ISIS. That would happen far from the frontlines because we don’t want Canadian troops to be involved [there] but also because we know that it is the local troops that are going to be effective at taking back their homes, their communities, and dropping in Western soldiers doesn’t make the situation better as, unfortunately, the Americans understood in Iraq awhile ago.”

He sees an opportunity for Canada to make an impact without being directly involved in the conflict. “We feel there’s a role for Canada to be a significant resource in training the local military, not in a direct combat role that Mr. Harper is proposing with the bombings,” he said.

Trudeau welcomed the opportunity to explain his support, with caveats, for the federal government’s anti-terrorism bill, C-51. “The Liberal party has always understood that we need to protect Canadian security and uphold our rights and freedoms – and you do them both together,” he said. “To our mind, Bill C-51, even though it has clear elements in it that increase the safety for Canadians – which is why we supported it – it doesn’t go far enough to uphold our rights and freedoms, which is why we’re committed to bringing in oversight, putting in a sunset and review clause onto our anti-terror legislation, and also narrowing and tightening some of the rules around what behavior CSIS [Canadian Security Intelligence Service] can have – warrantless searches and all those sorts of things.”

His political opponents, he said, go too far in each direction. “Mr. Harper thinks, ‘No, no, we don’t have to do anything more around rights and freedoms, we have enough, we’re just giving more power to our police,’” Trudeau said. “I think that’s a problem.

“Mr. Mulcair says, ‘No, we don’t need to do anything more on security. Even those things in C-51, we don’t need them, we’re fine the way it is.’” That is also a problem, according to Trudeau. “We have to do more,” he said. “But we have to do more on both sides.”

On other topics, the Liberal leader expressed support for increased trade with Israel. “We obviously support the latest announcement around Canada-Israel free trade,” he said. “I know it was a lot of agricultural stuff in this round, but it’s a very good thing. This was a deal that was signed by [Liberal prime minister] Jean Chrétien back in ’97 and the Liberal party believes in trade. We believe in free trade, and we’re happy to continue trade with Israel.”

Trudeau took the opportunity to reiterate his opposition to the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction (BDS) Israel.

“You can have all sorts of debates over positions, but when you’re engaged in demonization, delegitimization and double standards, that’s just not what we are as a country.”

“I think the BDS and anti-apartheid movement, as I’ve said many times, runs counter to Canadian values,” he said. “You can have all sorts of debates over positions, but when you’re engaged in demonization, delegitimization and double standards, that’s just not what we are as a country.”

The Independent also asked Trudeau about the Liberals’ approach to climate issues and social equality.

“At a very basic level, we get it, as Canadians, particularly here in B.C., that you cannot separate what’s good for the environment and what’s good for the economy anymore,” Trudeau said. “You have to do them both together, and you can’t get one without the other.

“You still have people saying, ‘Oh no, we have to work on the economy, so let’s forget about environmental oversight,’ or ‘We need to protect the environment, so, no, we can’t create jobs.’ Canadians know we need them both together,” he said. “One of the problems is we’ve had 10 years of such a lack of leadership on the environmental level that it’s hurting our economy. We need to get our resources to market in responsible, sustainable ways. We’re not able to do that right now because nobody trusts Mr. Harper to do it right. Restoring that sense of public trust, [so] that people know, we need jobs, we need economic growth … in a way that understands that it’s not just about governments granting permits, but about communities granting permission, as well.

“One of the things we’ve put forward in our environmental plan is that, in the 10 years of lack of leadership on the federal side, the provinces have moved forward,” Trudeau continued. “B.C. has a very successful carbon tax, Alberta put in a carbon levy-style tax, Ontario and Quebec are doing a cap-and-trade. What that means is that 86% of our economy has already put in a mechanism to put a price on carbon, so the federal government can’t suddenly say, ‘OK, we’re doing cap-and-trade. Sorry, B.C., you’re going to have to change your system,’ which would make no sense; or vice versa, ‘We’re doing a carbon tax.

Sorry, Ontario, you can’t do it.’ What we have to do is recognize that different jurisdictions will have different ways of reducing their emissions – the federal government has to be a partner, a supporter, an investor in our capacity to do that across the country, in order for us to reduce our emissions and be responsible about the environment.”

Trudeau acknowledged the solutions won’t be immediate. “We need to move beyond fossil fuels, but it’s not going to happen tomorrow,” he said. “Right now, a lot of people who are blocking and opposed to pipelines aren’t realizing that the alternative is a lot more oil by rail, which is really problematic – more expensive, more dangerous.” Under the circumstances, he said, people are just saying no: “No to everything, because we don’t trust the government in place.”

He said he hopes to form a government that addresses climate change, invests in clean technology, renewable resources and the kinds of jobs that advance beyond a fossil fuel economy. For now, “we have to make sure that our oil sands are developed going forward in a responsible, efficient way that doesn’t give us the black eye on the world stage and with our trading partners,” he said.

“The Liberal party believes in evidence-based policy and we believe in harm reduction. My own hometown, Montreal, is pushing hard to set up an Insite-type clinic. The Liberal party supports that. The Supreme Court supports that. This government, for ideological reasons, is pushing against it. I think that’s just wrong, and we’re happy to say that. ”

Vancouver has been the testing ground for new ways of dealing with addiction, particularly the Insite supervised drug injection clinic. “The Liberal party believes in evidence-based policy and we believe in harm reduction,” Trudeau said. “My own hometown, Montreal, is pushing hard to set up an Insite-type clinic. The Liberal party supports that. The Supreme Court supports that. This government, for ideological reasons, is pushing against it. I think that’s just wrong, and we’re happy to say that.”

In the same week that Canadian parents were receiving Universal Child Care Benefit [UCCB] cheques in the mail calibrated to the number of children in their home, Trudeau was promoting his party’s “fairness plan.”

“Mr. Harper’s child benefit, for example, goes to every family regardless of how wealthy they might be,” Trudeau said. “We, instead, decided, let’s make it means-tested so that people who need the help the most will get the best help. For a low-income family, it means up to $533 a month, tax-free, and then it grades down until someone making over $200,000 doesn’t get any child-care benefit at all. And the benefits that will go to the nine out of 10 Canadians will be tax-free, so the money you get is actually money you get to spend.”

The plan also proposes to lower the middle-class income bracket from 22 to 20.5, which will result in about $3 billion in lost revenue. “In order to get that $3 billion,” said Trudeau, “we’re bringing in a new tax bracket on the wealthiest Canadians, people who make over $200,000, to even things out. And it’s not just about redistribution, it’s also about growing the economy because we know, when middle-class families and the working poor have money in their pockets to spend, to grow, it stimulates the economy.

“Interestingly enough, the NDP is lined up with the Conservatives on those positions,” he added. “They support the Conservatives’ UCCB that gives big cheques, and they’re opposed to us bringing in a higher tax bracket for the wealthiest Canadians, which I don’t understand. They have their reasons for it but, for me, the NDP is supposed to be a party that stands up for the most vulnerable.”